D’habitude je voyage en français

It was a while ago....

Most of my travel to foreign countries has taken me either to Canada or to France. I have lived in Paris for brief periods and could live quite happily in Montreal. Even on a road trip around Scotland once, I was with bilingual speakers of French and English, and we generally spoke French in the car. Is it any wonder, then, that I associate foreign travel with the French language?

Sometimes going places within the United States triggers my French response. During the two years I lived in Cincinnati, Ohio, whenever I crossed the beautiful Roebling Bridge to Covington, Kentucky, I had the feeling I was leaving English behind and would be asked to show my passport on the far bank of the river. The Ohio River seemed that significant a border. And there are still occasions, driving around my home ground in Leelanau County, when I imagine my dear friend Helene, from Paris, with me in the car, and as we go down the roads I point out and explain to her various aspects of the Michigan landscape.

As the twig is bent, it is said, so the tree inclines. The high point of my father’s life was the time he spent in Paris after the city’s liberation at the end of World War II. 

His high school French got such a workout, he said, that it gave him a headache, but the experience was also heady in a positive sense. The young American lieutenant, sitting up all night in a bistro in Paris, discussing Corneille with Frenchmen! Is it any wonder he wanted his daughters (and I was the first-born) to learn as a second language the one that had brought him such excitement? Or any wonder that I caught the francophone fever at a very young age and never recovered?

“Je t’adore,” my father would murmur affectionately, and he would call me his “petit choux-fleur” (little cabbage or Brussels sprout, an untranslatable term of endearment), but when he barked an order it was always issued formally: “Fermez la porte!” Thus when my high school French teacher on the first day of class, bound to immerse us in the language, began by issuing the familiar command to shut the door (the hallway was very noisy in a school of 5,000 students), it was no mystery to me what he was saying. I felt, happily, right at home. 

The French-speaking parts of my father’s war experience were his best times, first billeted in a private home in the Netherlands, and later, as liquor control officer in the south of France, making trips up to Paris for troop “supplies.” Between those times, however, he was stationed for a while in the Tongan Islands, where his group of engineers constructed an airstrip for Allied landings in the Pacific. That place was a very different kettle of international fish. Outdoor showers! An enormous bunch of fresh bananas hung in a tree outside his tent every day!

In the 1940s, as I understand it, the Tongan language had yet to take written form. My father, therefore, ever the amateur linguist, took it upon himself to assemble the beginnings of a Tongan dictionary. Alors, besides French, my sisters and I learned to say a few simple phrases in Tongan. Imagine my surprise and delight, many years later, to encounter Tongan phrases in a book (by a young man who sailed solo around the world) and to understand those foreign phrases! The sounds really meant what my father had told us they meant! Real people spoke to each other in those words I was taught as a child! How satisfying!

In the wee dark hours of the night before departure for Mexico, where a friend and I would be conducted on a five-day, six-person tour of Mayan ruins in the Yucatan peninsula, as I was casting about in the middle of the night for phrases in Spanish (a language I studied for only a single year in high school), more often French words and phrases, maddeningly, came to mind. After all, the total experience and history of my lifetime was deciding, in whatever unconscious part of the mind that sorts these things out, that I was going abroad; therefore, I should be speaking French. Descartes would have understood, I’m sure (I; therefore, I, if you see what I mean), but I felt the decider in my head was decidedly unhelpful in this instance. 

How to escape middle-of-the-night travel anxiety? An emergency scenario came into my mind, of course! There I was in Mexico, having to explain myself in a foreign country to medical personnel who spoke no English! Omigod! Mon dieu!

— Was it cheating on my part to introduce into the imaginary scene an intern from Haiti who spoke (thank you again, Descartes) clear and distinct French?

I cannot now reconstruct the train of thought that took me from that imaginary hospital back to the lobby of an imaginary hotel or how I managed to bring imaginary Tongan tourists to the hotel lobby, but you can guess how delighted I was to encounter them! “Malolalei!” I greeted them with joyful enthusiasm, and broad smiles and sparkling eyes on their part told me my greeting had succeeded. One of the women had a baby. “Tomasii? Taahini?” I asked. (My spellings of all these words are my own, the best I can do. Ask me to pronounce them, and I’ll do just fine.) The baby was a boy, the mother told me, and I gave my compliment on the child’s beauty immediately: “Faka ofa ofa opito opito!” and somehow I worked into the exchange my two remaining Tongan phrases, the How-are-you-I-am-fine component, before I was thrown back, once more, onto French — which one of their party spoke perfectly! 

Just my luck! Saved from the middle-of-the-night heebie-jeebies!

Back when I was eighteen and for many years after, I had great language-learning hopes and plans. I wanted to learn Greek (to read Aristotle in the original), Hebrew (for reading the Bible and works of Jewish scholars), Russian (such great literature!), and Amharic (because an Ethiopian friend and I had concocted a scheme that called for me to spend a year with her family in Addis Ababa). I would also, of course, brush up on and extend my Spanish to a proficiency level and add a bit of Italian while I was at it. Ambitious program, but others have done it, made whole careers in languages.

One spring in Paris, I gave myself an assignment to learn Italian from a book written for French speakers, reasoning that building a bridge from French to Italian, rather than working from English to Italian, would strengthen rather than eclipse my working French, but the only phrase that sticks with me now is “I ate too well.” On a different project, another year, I learned to say “I’m sorry” and how to order “baked eels” in Dutch. More seriously, I took beginning American Sign Language over and over again, year after year, each time temporarily achieving a decent beginner’s level of proficiency, only to lose it for lack of practice.

But French, its rudiments drilled into me at a young age, has persisted. Over the years, occasional French tourists in my bookstore have provided me with an opportunity for conversation, and there are always French movies and books in French to keep those brain cells alive. I never did learn the Greek or Hebrew or Russian or Amharic alphabets but am pretty comfortable with French accents and vigorously oppose (for reasons of history and tradition and personal attachment) the abandonment of the accent circonflex. 

One of my two biggest complaints against the program I am using on my new laptop is that it has no way to insert symbols or accent marks! (I managed the heading for this post by finding the word in my Internet search bar and copying and pasting it.) They are not in my mail program, either, as they were on the old laptop. Curses! I must overcome this lack in the near future….

1/6/2018. I set myself this little composing task before sunrise on departure day, and it has served its purpose: That is, re-living my personal foreign language history has successfully taken my mind away from worries about a drifted-over driveway or icy roads or a delayed or cancelled flight. And everything will be all right, I’m sure. — In fact, by the time this post is published on Books in Northport, I will be back from Mexico, with worries all behind me, a great store of new memories, and many more recent stories, including whatever splendid successes or horrible failures I have with the Spanish language south of the border.

Friday, 1/12 - I am back home!!!

The Enduring Nature of the Written Word

My son came up from Kalamazoo for a five-day visit over the Thanksgiving weekend, and somehow on Sunday morning we found ourselves pawing through an old trunk I had not opened for years. Oh, the treasures that emerged from that archive! 

There were letters he had written me from camp when he was a kid and a little stash of hand-made “coupons” he’d given me as a gift, coupons I could redeem for various chores he would do around the house. “And you didn’t use any of them,” he noted. “I didn’t want to give them up!” I told him. “They were too cute!” Another gem was a handwritten note from a girl in his grade school class, asking me for a copy of a snapshot I’d taken of the two of them at Ian’s birthday party. “I want to see how romantic we look,” she wrote. Or rather, she printed. They must have been in third grade then, not yet learning cursive writing. 

Copies of letters my grandmother had written to my mother were there, along with a copy of a letter one of my aunts had written to my mother, all of this fascinating correspondence concerning the revelation of an old family secret. I read the letters aloud to my son, refreshing my own memory with the details. I’ll keep in mind this winter the fact that my mother’s parents were married in February of 1918, making it a century ago three months from now. 

I found a box of color slides from photographs I took during my two years in Cincinnati (1987-88) and will have those made into prints and also stored on DVD very soon. (The architecture of Cincinnati fascinated me, as did the hilly terrain. It was rich territory to explore with a camera.) I also found handful after handful of photographic prints, some dating back fifty years or more. The color was not always the best, but everyone in the pictures was recognizable.

A very modest collection of receipts and tissue wrappings from purchases (e.g., cheese) made in Paris appeared. I could never bear to throw away any scrap of paper that came my way in France, with words printed in French and sometimes a reproduced line drawing of a shop front or of the Eiffel Tower. You must understand that I shivered with pleasure over the phrase “vêtements d’hiver” (winter clothes) scrawled on a box in the closet of the apartment where I first stayed in Paris. Four years of high school French and the smattering I’d picked up before that from my father had not fully prepared me for the wonder of being in a foreign country and actually managing to make my way around in another language, one I felt I’d learned in a way somewhat similar to the way I had learned to read music, another mysterious, magic, “other” language. It worked! I felt like a gifted code-cracker!

But there is plenty of magic in English, and I was thrilled to discover in the trunk a couple of irreplaceable family items I had been afraid I’d lost forever. Before they married, before they had even met, my father and my mother, each separately, collected into little books their favorite poems. In 1974 the two books were given to me. With the exception of one verse my father composed with his high school French, my parents did not themselves write any of the works in their books, but their selections are windows into their youthful sensibilities. 

What did these two young people have in common? What aspects of their personalities were very different? Some overlap between the two collections gives clues, as do the majority of items found in one book but not in another. 

Neither book has either table of contents or index, but my father’s, titled “Favora Quotation Gilberti,” dated1941, begins with an “Indication of general trend…” listing eight attributes: amusing; slightly risqué; cynical philosophy; toward celibacy; satire; truism; good phrasing; and romantic: beautiful and healthy sentiment. Not everything in his book is a poem. Many entries are simply pithy sayings, and many verses and pithy sayings are attributed to “Anon,” for example this ironic observation that gives the lie to my entire thesis today:

Lives of great men all remind us 

As their pages o’er we turn, 

That we’re apt to leave behind us 

Letters that we ought to burn. 

There is no indication which heading he would have assigned here. Cynical, probably. There was more of cynicism and satire in my father’s collection than in my mothers, but both had generous helpings of romantic choices. And both include pieces by Edna St. Vincent Millay and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, though I note that my father attributes the latter’s words to “Elizabeth Browning,” omitting the poet’s family name, while my mother invariably used all three names.

My mother’s collection includes Sara Teasdale, Eugene Field, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. I don’t find as many entries from “Anon.” as my father had, but a few, such as the two lists “Helps for Daily Living” and “Married Wisdom” have no attribution. (Actually, the latter, which is the first piece in her book, says “Author Unknown.” Could it be that favorite of my father, “Anon.”?!) My mother’s collection also has more entries from women, the names often unfamiliar to me. There are also fewer humorous pieces in my mother’s book, so Richard’s Armour’s “A Thousand Times No” stands out: 

Some take great pride in saying No, 

They scorn an easy Yes. 

Assent is sign of weakness, so 

To none will they confess. 

For utterance of No they live, 

Nor would they have you doubt it. 

They’re very, very negative 

And positive about it!

At the end of my mother’s collection, following Robert Herrick’s “To the Virgins, to Make Use of Time” and Sarah Dunnings’s “These Things I Love,” comes a list of dated topics for what looks like a music class, “Hints for Song Leaders,” “How to Present a New Song,” and finally a recipe for Helen’s Peanut Butter Cookies, but my mother’s name appears nowhere in her book.  

Besides family memorabilia, I found in the trunk many bundles of letters from friends, a few with literary associations. There were two letters from Jim Harrison, one from Joyce, Jim’s assistant, three from Guy de la Valdene, and one from poet Dan Gerber, all these resulting from typing, proof-reading, and editing I’d done for him and Guy and Dan back in the old days. 

Then there was a xeroxed copy of the wonderful handwritten journal my sister kept on her first trip (with now-husband Bob) to the Boundary Waters, up from Minnesota into Canada, her first wilderness experience, with canoe portages and camp coffee and losing her camera to a black bear! I read aloud from the pages to my son (with David listening from the next room) and especially loved the full page listing of all the sounds of the wilderness, none having anything to do with traffic or phones.

All these memories are priceless to me, despite the mustiness of a trunk that had been closed for years. 

As I held color slides up to the light, exclaiming over the images, my son made a comment about digitizing old media files, and that’s well and good, I suppose. But if hard copies are not kept, if only digital files remain, I worry that those files could become unopenable black boxes to future generations. They are not, after all, human-readable, and as the technology to read digital files advances as breakneck speed, earlier readers become so much junk. There is also the question of “where” the files will be stored. In a “cloud”? As my son noted, “A cloud is just someone else’s computer.” 

I’ve never liked the idea of keeping my photographs or books in a cloud, anyway, and I wouldn’t want to reduce precious old letters from friends and family and photographs of same to someone else's storage black box. My old black trunk has served me well. And I have always been in love with paper and with holding physical objects in my hands. 

Sliding sheets of handwriting from envelopes (first appreciating the beautiful postage stamps), turning pages, shuffling and stacking snapshots and slides are pleasures I have no intention of foregoing, as long as they are available to me, and I hope that will be for the rest of my life.

The Apples Have Always Been Rolling

Someone dropped off bales of hay for the deer

I am being led to a conclusion can only be provisional at this stage, but what I’m thinking is that the world of publishing and bookselling, at least as far as the English language is concerned, has always been in a state of upheaval. One historian wrote the following in 1889, reflecting on the English book world of the 1500s:

In prosecuting an inquiry into the general state of bookselling just three hundred years ago, a frequent and not altogether explicable circumstance is that in relation to the different imprints which appear in some cases in the same year on one work. There was practically no such thing as copyright; and the moment a manuscript left the author's hand, and found its way into the printing-office, all claim on the part of the author ceased. If one bookseller had sufficient confidence to publish a poem or a play, and it proved successful, the chances were a thousand to one that rival tradesmen would offer rival copies. – William Roberts, The Earlier History of English Bookselling, 1889

Now, you know those warnings on DVD movies about piracy not being a victimless crime? It isn’t a new crime, either. Nor was it the only concern in the book world of the sixteenth century. As might readily be imagined – and, in fact, as we all learned in our history lessons back in high school – the introduction of the printing press brought challenges to political and religious authority. If ordinary people became literate and could read the Bible for themselves, what was to stop them from interpreting it for themselves? From thinking for themselves on all matter of questions?

For example, parallel to revolutions in politics and theology came a revolution in medicine, the idea that every literate Englishman might be “his own doctor.”

Just as the publication of the Bible in the vernacular eventually made ministers redundant, by selling printed matter that enabled every man to become his own doctor, which the title of one publication proposed, London bookmen undermined the legal monopoly of the traditional medical establishment and assured the success of its challengers. – Elizabeth Lane Furdell, Publishing and Medicine in Early Modern England (University of Rochester Press, 2002)

The bare notion of medical books being published in English rather than Latin was deemed dangerous by many in the Royal College of Physicians of London, those Furdell refers to as the “philosopher-kings of medicine” of the time, although Sir Thomas Elyot, author of Castle of Helth [sic], published in 1543, defended the practice by bidding his critics

“...remember that the Greeks wrote in Greeke, that Romaines in Latin, Avicinna and the other in Arabick, which were their owne proper and maternall tongues.” – quoted in Furnall, ibid.

Sixteenth-century medical books for the general public included botanicals, herbals, astrological treatises, recipe books “with lists of ingredients and directions for usage,” the line between cooking and preparation of remedies blurred in literature as well as in practice.

In early modern England, the “author” of a book (especially a foreign author whose work might be translated and published without his permission, let alone any remuneration) had little standing unless he were also a printer, and a printer might begin in a small way and work up to maintaining his own bookshop -- vertical integration at the very birth of the business of publishing and bookselling! Publishers of medical books often sold the remedies, also, in their combination bookshop/drugstores. Self-publishing and one-stop shopping!

Rivalry among printer/publisher/booksellers was fierce, too. Any “stationer” could record the name of a work (this had to be done in person) in the books kept at the Company Hall of the London Company of Stationers (“a union of printers, booksellers, bookbinders, and a few paper merchants”), which was chartered in 1557 to self-police the book trade. Along with recording the work, the union “stationer” paid a fee to register it, thus effectively blocking anyone else from publishing it, and not surprisingly cutthroat practices developed, such that “an ambitious printer ... registering a sweeping series title for anticipated books” could block rivals out of an entire topic or category.

Who owns a name? Today’s copyright and patent wars are nothing new; they have roots at least as far back as the sixteenth century.

Picture a struggling bookseller of the 1500s -- burdened with a large capital investment in printing presses, threatened by jealous physicians and clerics, harassed by government censors, set about by unscrupulous rivals – did he manage to get any sleep at all? Or did she, in those cases (and there were several) where a wife inherited her husband’s printing business and continued it herself, sometimes marrying a young apprentice printer to share the work?

The Charles Dickens biography I read recently shed a little light on nineteenth century practices, both in England and in America. Dickens had his first success, Pickwick Papers, with the publishers Chapman and Hall in London. Robert Seymour, a caricature artist, had suggested a series of sporting plates to Mr. Chapman, and Mr. Hall invited Dickens to contribute “letter-press,” or text to accompany the illustrations. The serial publication of the work was a flop (the publishers nearly abandoned it after a few numbers), but Dickens had a huge success from the subsequent book. Dickens received £2,500 and a share in the copyright, while the publishers’ profits were over £20,000. Thirty-two manuscript pages of Pickwick sold for $775 in 1895, according to Leacock, and for $35,000 in 1928. What would those pages bring today? Of course, Dickens did not see these later amounts, but he was even in his day a rich man, made rich by his writing, though others did the printing, publishing, and selling of his work.

To return to the knotty business of piracy-- the United States in the nineteenth century, at that time a young country, had no respect whatsoever for copyrights issued overseas, and Charles Dickens was terribly affronted by the publication of his works in America, earning him no royalties. In fact, while his first American tour began with loud, effusive mutual admiration and gratitude, Dickens and the Americans seeming completely in love with one another, the longer the tour went on, the more Dickens found the issue of nonpayment of royalties rankled. According to Leacock, along with slavery and tobacco-spitting it formed a triumvirate of offenses committed by the former colony.

(When did American publishers first begin paying royalties to foreign authors? The first step in that direction was the Copyright Act of 1891, but I seem to remember, vaguely, that one prestigious American publishing house was ahead of the curve, making a corporate decision to do the right thing before they were forced to it. The question is, which publisher was it? I don’t recall and am too impatient to keep searching for the answer this morning.)

Sometimes in my random reading, an unintended theme emerges, and so it has been this March. Discovering the English travel writer Norman Lewis (I have yet to read any of his novels), I find myself following a minor thread in his book The World, The World, namely, his relationship, and those of a few others, with his publisher Jonathan Cape. In 1948 Lewis took a novel to Routledge, where a friend of his regretfully told him it was “publishable ... but perhaps not for us.” It was suggested that he try Jonathan Cape, then the top of the English publishing world.

Here is one bit I liked: One man’s way of sorting through manuscripts was to read a few pages and then, if those pages passed muster, to set the manuscript aside to take home. This man read about ten manuscripts a week. The method of the second man was to read the first page of the manuscript, two or three at random from the middle, then the end, taking only about fifteen minutes at the task. Lewis remarks that he was fortunate in the pages Daniel George read from the middle of his own work. He was also fortunate in his contract with the publisher, apparently. Not so fortunate had been Mary Webb, as Lewis relates.

The publicity campaign for Webb’s Precious Bane is a story in itself (did Jonathan Cape invent hype in the 1950s?), but her treatment at the hands of her publisher were of a very different order. Sensing a bestseller, Cape bought up copyrights for Webb’s previous “near-flops,” which in the wake of Precious Bane “shared enough of the limelight to become commercially viable,” but then refused to pay “anticipatory release” of royalties.

She remained short of cash and her appeals for loans were turned down. Jonathan refused to see her and his deputy Wren Howard put her off and got his face smacked. By this time her health was failing. She was reduced to keeping a flower stall on Shrewsbury market, and with her books selling by the thousands – as they continued to do for many years – she died in near poverty. – Norman Lewis, The World, The World  (NY: Henry Holt, 1997)

Scraping along as a flower-seller until her death in “near poverty” while her books were selling “by the thousands”! There is a story! The prize studs in Jonathan Cape’s stables were T. E. Lawrence and Ian Fleming, and it was through Fleming that Lewis came to meet Ernest Hemingway, whose first book Cape had published. Mary Webb, it seems, was only the goose roasted for the others’ Christmas dinner.

A blink in time's eye

My point in all of this is simply that there probably has never been, since the beginning of books printed, published, and sold in the English language, any time when the book trade was settled and secure. Self-publishing is not new; vertical integration is not new; public desire for direct access to medical information is not new; piracy is not new. 

We tend to think of the constant change and reshuffling of our own time as the upsetting of a long-stable apple cart, but the truth seems more like a continual upsetting over the course of more than five hundred years. 

All God's creatures scrabbling to make a living --

Midwinter Potluck

February 21, 2014

[I wrote this on Friday but waited until this (Saturday) morning to post it. Please note that today is Northport's Winter Carnival out at Braman Hill -- chili cook-off contest, cardboard sled races for the little ones, milk jug curling for the older crowd, etc., etc. A fine, wint'ry time will be had by all who attend.]

View out front window

No single large topic. It’s a wild, windy day, and my brain doesn’t want to settle down. Big news is that the ice caves are over! Open water, moving ice, very dangerous! Don’t go! Okay, that was my public service announcement, and now for the more mundane agenda:

(1)        I’ve been noticing something for several years now. When I was in grade school (and my grade’s spelling champion from third through sixth grade), we spelled anyone, anywhere, anyhow, anyway as single words; any time was two separate words, as was any more. We had no rule to tell us whether to separate the words or not, any more than French has a rule for whether a noun takes the feminine or masculine article. It was just something we had to learn, one instance a time. Increasingly these days, American-style English seems to jam together any two words of which the first word is any. I’m not going off on a tirade about this. It’s no big deal. Language evolves, and common phrases tend to associate more closely over time, baby sitter becoming baby-sitter becoming babysitter. In fact, copy editor became copy-editor became copyeditor, and all the young copyeditors operate on the jammed-together style. Well, yes, I can learn new tricks and make a point to do so from time to time. But change my ways on these spellings? Don’t look for me to be doing that any time soon. Old spelling champions’ habits die hard. -- And there the spelling program wants me to squash together die and hard, but diehard (a noun) isn’t what I mean: I’m talking about dying hard! Sheesh!

(2)        Here’s another recent linguistic phenomenon. The word so used to function almost exclusively as a transition word, an alternative to thus or therefore or in order to. Some years ago, I noticed someone using it apparently at random, not as a transition from one thought to a logical implication but simply to begin a sentence. She might be answering a question or merely introducing a topic. "So, we were doing such-and-such...." The word so here functioned basically as a verbal throat-clearing, with no more meaning than uh. Again, this is not a tirade I’m embarking on. No big deal. But I find it interesting to note how pervasive what I call "the throat-clearing so" has become. Listen for it the next time you hear someone being interviewed on radio. And beware (if you have not already succumbed), because it can be contagious, which is no doubt that’s why we’re hearing it everywhere these days. Not very important, and yet it strikes my ear as a kind of verbal tic, and I’m trying mightily to resist it.

(3)        Well, then there’s the academic who thinks we could get all perfectly well without commas, but I’m not about to get into that one. You can guess which side I’d be on, anyway. 

(4)        About leaving comments on this blog: More than one person has asked me in frustration if they must have a Google account to leave comments. “It keeps asking me for my Google account name!” My intrepid, persevering sister (one of them; actually, I have two, both of whom are intrepid and persevering) figured out why she was encountering that particular roadblock. It was because her browser default was set to Google, i.e., she was on Google (on?) while trying to leave a comment. If you don’t want a Google account, you can visit via another browser and post a comment as Anonymous. What was interesting to me was that people could be on Google and not know it. But, more importantly, now that I've given you the key, please go back a couple of days and leave a comment on the most recent book review post to be eligible for a book giveaway. A name will be chosen a week from today, Saturday, March 1 (weather permitting!).

The way it looks today

The LAW OFFICE sign will be gone from the front of the building by summer. We were shocked and saddened by the sudden, unexpected death of our lawyer neighbor, Bill. Moving forward, however, David was hard at work on this stormy Friday, painting the floor a brighter, cheerier color as he prepares to expand his gallery space right up to the windows onto Waukazoo Street. 

A can of paint, a bowl of chili from the Garage Bar & Grill -- let it snow, let it snow, let it snow! -- As if we had a choice, right?

Guest Blogger: A Polemic From the Prairie

The Political Challenges Inherent in Solving English Language Instruction and the Push for Latin as a Tool to Instruct Children in Learning Grammar

This essay is in part in reply to an article Pamela wrote concerning her frequent use of the present active participle. I was struck by the way in which American society at present rarely discusses grammar and the way in which grammar is taught today.  Originally, I had planned on writing only about how Latin might better teach children grammar in English, but my thoughts soon turned to the larger problem of NCLB and the way in which English is taught to children today. 

I read your article on the present active participle (that you posted some time ago), and I wanted you to know I enjoyed it. We as a society rarely discuss grammar, and it's good to know someone appreciates it as much as I do! Maybe we could reverse this trend if we brought Latin back into the curriculum, but that's a hard sell these days, though for what it's worth I was a colloquium a few years ago at U of I and the chair of the classics department at Indiana was going on and on about how Latin and foreign language in general are so effective at teaching kids grammar in English. I would surmise this is likely because our English grammar was adapted from Latin (and later French as well) and as such is not very intuition-friendly. Once the grammar has been established in another language, however, the student "translates" the grammar he or she knows from that language to English, just as the original grammarians did.

Yet, despite the common sense conclusion of the above stipulation, there is little reason to believe that school districts are going to start implementing Latin into their curricula at any time in the near future.  There are a number of reasons for this, mostly rooted in the fact that school districts must educate students in such a way so that they pass state standardized testing requirements at the end of the year.  These requirements, set forth in the federal No Child Left Behind Act, serve as a metric for which to judge school performance. Schools that fail to make “adequate yearly progress” in consecutive years may be forced to close, and states that fail to meet guidelines may lose federal funding.  So in response to the need to meet these requirements school districts across the country have implemented curricula that place emphasis on the material covered in these tests to such a degree that a standard curriculum has been adapted to meet the very language of the test, often to the detriment of the education the child actually receives. A good example here is the use of the term “magnitude” for “absolute value” in mathematics education. Even though the term “absolute value” is used across the board in higher education mathematics and the academic world in general, because someone decided that the term “magnitude” was more palatable this is the term used to educate students. 


The situation is no better in the reading and writing curriculum which, instead of nurturing a desire to read and an appreciation for language via grammatical instruction, forces children to memorize the differences between, for example, the “main idea” and “supporting details” in very boring passages so that they can pass the tests the state needs them to pass in order to receive federal funds. Forget diagramming sentences, which have almost entirely gone by the wayside; the push now is to develop only those ideas which are tested at the state level.  This is a tragedy, students are denied the best tools to develop actual comprehension, teachers are denied the autonomy they need in order to teach effectively, and those who develop a curriculum must tailor it in ways to meet the standards set forth by the states at the expense of what actually works. Yes, there is presently a “dumbing down” in curriculum development, and almost everybody is losing.

--Which is why it is all the more difficult to argue for changes such as the implementation of Latin and French as instructional tools in teaching effective grammar skills. The blowback that academics who push for this change undeniably face (if they are heard at all) is perfectly well understood because in many cases there simply is no space for these ideas in the curriculum.  Where there is space, educators are hard at work implementing their own ideas and might not be receptive to what they perceive to be little more that elitist academic suggestions. 

This is unfortunate, to say the least. Elitist or not, it is simply a fact that English grammar was shaped by Latin and that grammarians who taught English historically understood that language as well. There is no good reason not to teach English in such a way in that it “makes sense” to the students, especially those who come from backgrounds where English is not a first language or where the English spoken as home differs significantly from the English as it is taught in the schools.  Latin allows for the implementation of grammatical rules that do make sense, that teach subject and object, imperfect and perfect tense, and the relative pronoun in such a way as that it is abstracted from the politics of the English language; no matter what variety of the English is spoken at home, the rules learned from Latin carry over and comprehension is improved. 

I think eventually we will come to terms with NCLB and the way in which education is disseminated in America, but it may well be years down the road when we realize that the standardized testing–driven approach to education is counterproductive.  When that occurs, we will look more seriously at the arguments made by academics and educators to implement a better English curriculum, and we will undoubtedly find arguments to return to sentence diagramming, the teaching of Latin, and also the teaching of foreign language not just as a tool to understand another language but to better understand our own.

Despite the fact that I am pessimistic about change in the near future, I am not willing to capitulate, because if there is no push from those of us who are aware of the benefits of teaching English in this way, then we will most certainly lose. Maybe the solution is a push from the nonprofit sector to implement more "Language Arts" (a nebulous phrase as we rarely use the term "arts" in that sense any more) and incorporate some Latin into the curriculum--in other words, taking an entirely gradualist approach. At present that's not where the money is, but once is case is made to the right people, in the right way (i.e. not just expecting people to adapt their curriculum because we are right and they are wrong), perhaps it will be.

We also have to be aware of the politics at play and be sensitive to the fact that many individuals have their hearts in the right places and really are doing what they can to educate students.  I'm not on vanguard here (yet), but I do recognize that this push must come from people from different walks of life, not just academics who are known to shout angrily into the wind on occasion. 



In any event, it’s a long, tough road ahead.

- Matthew Case

B.A., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Master’s in Public Administration candidate, 2013,

University of Illinois at Springfield

P.S. Monday, April 30: For another view and response to Matthew's position, see Ben Wetherbee's blog post here. 

Parallelism, Random Examples of; Thoughts on

In a grocery checkout line in Cincinnati with a fellow graduate student, I noticed that the clerk’s curiosity was awakened when she heard my friend’s speech. To American ears, her English—one of two native languages she had grown up speaking—sounded accented.

“Where are you from?” came the inevitable question.

“Africa,” my friend answered laconically.

As we left the store, I asked her why she gave such a vague, general answer, why she didn’t say she was from Ethiopia.

“Most Americans? They don’t care. All they know is Africa.” She was also smiling, I should add. My friend was not a bitter or resentful person.

Over the years, again and again, I have noticed Americans referring to Africa as if it were a country rather than a continent. And yet they would never say of themselves that they are from “North America,” and if their question to a foreigner were answered with the name “Europe,” they would press for a specific country. Only when it comes to the continent of Africa does the parallelism break down, and when I hear examples, I am embarrassed for my fellow Americans.

Climbing and clambering. The ‘b’ is silent in the first, and pronouncing the second with a silent ‘b’ is perfectly acceptable, also. I prefer it that way for the parallelism. (Scrambling, on the other hand, needs its ‘b’ sound because of the ‘l’ that follows.) It wouldn’t surprise me to learn there are differences in the pronunciation of the word clamber from one part of the United States to another, and it may be one of those words (I’m not looking it up, but you are welcome to do so) about which the English apply a rule different from ours. The English so often have their own way of pronouncing words. Schedule, for example. Countries sharing a language, like siblings sharing a bedroom, are in frequent disagreement over what is allowable, sharing and dispute being two sides of one coin.

Foralongtimeinhumanhistorylanguagewaswrittenwithoutpunctuationandwithoutseparationbetweenwords. That we separate words now and punctuate sentences is a matter of convention. Some find the fluidity of language maddening, but one might as well be maddened by the evolution of plant and animal species.


Part of my garden this year is planted in the ground, part in straw bales, and a few items in wooden boxes. In the boxes are chard, spinach, kale and leaf lettuce, the lettuce only in double rows. Parallel rows. The boxes, as you can see, are placed end to end rather than parallel, for easier care, and as the greens have come in, the original seed rows have disappeared beneath the plants. Rabbits—amazingly, incredibly—have not bothered anything in the boxes. Yet!

Very young children are said to engage in “parallel play,” which means that they are playing in solitary fashion in one another’s vicinity—for example, two children in the same room, playing on the floor, each absorbed in his or her own make-believe. Around the yard in summer, David and I often engage in parallel work. When one of us finishes a job, we show off our accomplishment and invite the other’s appreciation.

Teachers of composition and speech are keen on parallelism. I like it, too. I feel in it an aspect of the more general idea of equality, something we feel before we conceptualize it at all.

I was surprised to finish reading Paul Auster's Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure so quickly. There were so many pages left, two-thirds of the physical book or so, but three appendices had swelled the volume. I didn't read the appendices. I did put the memoir on my "Books Read" list. This has nothing whatsoever to do with parallelism. So while we're off the subject, how do you feel about arugula?

One More Teeny Tirade from a Word Crank, Plus a Slightly Shady Joke

Maiya busted me yesterday on multiple-digit numbers. They do not take an apostrophe, as do single-digit numbers when plural, so my post needed editing to incorporate her correction. I had already edited it once to add in the its/it’s confusion, my original motivation for writing about apostrophes in the first place.

To recap that one little area: its: possessive pronoun (like my); it’s: it is. They are not interchangeable. This is not a question of variable style on which opinions may differ.

My crank for today is short and simple. I, he, she, they are subject pronouns. The object forms are me, him, her, them. (You doesn’t change so creates no problems.) The most common error made by educated people is to use ‘I’ when ‘me’ is correct. “They gave Richard and I a gift.” No, no, no!!! You would never say, “They gave I a gift,” would you? Correct: “They gave Richard and me a gift” or “They gave a gift to Richard and me.” When in doubt, leave the proper name out and see how it sounds.

John O’Hara used the incorrect form intentionally in dialogue, arguing with copy editors who wanted to "correct" the way his characters spoke that young, upperclass, educated people really did make this mistake all the time. And such people--not just young ones, either--still do. So if you’re writing dialogue, and you want to show your character making a grammatical error, it works. Otherwise, you’re the one making the error, and that doesn’t work.

Oops, I almost forgot the joke. It’s about a philosopher giving a lecture and looking to generalize his point by using letters instead of specific object names. He was talking about 'essences,' or what medieval philosophers called ‘quiddity,’ such as the 'horseness' of horses, only he didn’t want it to sound as if only horses or apples or tables had essences, so he began by using the letters ‘a’ and ‘b’ but was quickly led into a –ness form that sounded very peculiar and distracting. Backtracking, he erased the chalk letters ‘a’ and ‘b’ on the board and replaced them with the letters ‘p’ and ‘q’. Where the lecture went from there I leave to your imagination.

Yes (sigh!), this is what passes for a joke among philosophers.